- Christina Barton, ‘Becoming Billy Apple’, in The Expatriates: Frances Hodgkins and Barrie Bates (Wellington: Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington, 2005), 5–22.
- ‘Who is Billy Apple?: The Artist after the Death of the Subject’, Reading Room: A Journal of Art and Culture 1 (2007), 80–95.
- My thinking here aligns with comments Andrea Giunta makes with reference to art history in Argentina, where she writes, ‘Contemporary Argentine art history bases itself upon a Western conceptual scheme. That is trivially so because art history is a discipline established in the West, but more deeply the case because Latin America is an active part of the establishment of the idea of the West. The main question would be what purpose art history serves… that is, what is it about the cultural processes in Latin America that it will allow us to reveal what other disciplines cannot.’ See Andrea Giunta, ‘Notes on Art History in Latin America’, in Is Art History Global?, ed. James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2007), 36–37.
- A typical account of the period can be found in Marco Livingstone, ‘Prototypes of Pop’, in Exhibition Road: Painters at the RCA, ed. Paul Huxley (London: Phaidon and Christies, 1988), 41–53.
- Unusual for the reception of student work, the Young Contemporaries shows held an important place in the London art scene in these years. See my discussion in The Expatriates.
- For more information about this, see The Expatriates.
- See David Hockney, David Hockney by David Hockney (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976), 40–41.
- This can be dated from a postcard (Billy Apple Archive) Bates sent home dated 22 October 1961, which mentions the wedding. The photograph shows Hockney and Apple with their general studies lecturer, Michael Kullmann, in the background. Although the artist no longer remembers the name of the student getting married or who took the photographs, the image is now held in the artist's archive.
- A contrast between this and official photographs (sourced from the Billy Apple Archive) of Apple at the dinner celebrating the inaugural Layton Student Design Award (of which he was the first recipient), only a few months earlier in May, show the extent to which this moment is still caught between the strictures of tradition and the new freedoms of the 1960s. Here Apple is shown neatly dressed in a suit with collar and tie, like the line-up of dignitaries with whom he is seen dining.
- My thanks to Wystan Curnow for invaluable information in part contained in his unpublished essay written for an exhibition of Apple's self portraits (Self Portraits 1962–1967) at Artspace, Auckland, 1997.
- Hockney gave this drawing to Apple, who subsequently sold it to Sidney R. Solomon, a New York collector. Apple in conversation with the author, October 2008.
- Though not one of the four paintings selected as Hockney's contribution to the 1962 Young Contemporaries exhibition, this work has been retained for the College's collection.
- Hockney, 42.
- Carel Weight, head of painting, remembered the London of his youth as an ‘artistic backwater boasting about a dozen dealer galleries, none of which would seriously consider giving an exhibition to a young painter emerging from art school’, in contrast to the situation in the 1960s where there were ‘at least a hundred galleries catering increasingly to the new and up-and-coming’. Weight cited by Christopher Frayling, in Exhibition Road: Painters at the RCA, ed. Paul Huxley (London: Phaidon and Christies, 1988), 159.
- With its multiple levels of ventriloquism, this thesis is a step further than Hockney's own disregard for the academic rulebook, which saw him produce an illustrated thesis on Fauvism ‘written at great speed, and… chaotically argued’, according to RCA historian Christopher Frayling. Frayling, 163.
- This is Young Contemporaries 1962, artist's collection, produced in 1961 in preparation for exhibition that opened 7 February 1962.
- Three letters, one of them dramatically torn in half, from J. R. P. Moon, the RCA Registrar, were included in The Expatriates.
- For a fuller discussion of this, see my essay ‘Who is Billy Apple?’.
- Ibid.
- See The Expatriates.
- Hockney and Apple were two of ten artists in a show called Pop Art at the Midland Group Gallery (25 May-15 June 1963) in Nottingham, and they each had a painting selected for the touring show that the Arts Council of Great Britain co-ordinated of works from the 1962 Young Contemporaries exhibition that travelled to five centres outside London through the latter half of 1962.
- Perhaps one of the more intriguing projects Apple undertook at this time was a film-screening event at the ICA, Motion Picture Meets the Apple (29 October 1963), which included his short film Billy's Apple and Friends, showing his bronze sculptures of fruit relocated in the market stalls of the city (1963), along with a range of other moving image material related to this theme.
- Hal Foster calls it Warhol's ‘wonder year’; see his ‘Survey’, in Pop, ed. Hal Foster and Mark Francis (London: Phaidon, 2005), 28.
- Wystan Curnow lists a number of artists Apple met (including James Rosenquist, Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman, as well as Indiana, all of whom had studios on Coenties Slip, where Richard Smith had been based during his time in New York, through whom Apple was able to secure introductions) and galleries he visited (Green Gallery, Martha Jackson, Betty Parsons, Allan Stone, and Pace among them). See Curnow, note 10.
- For a description of the gallery at this time, see Paul Cummings, ‘Oral history interview with Ivan C. Karp’, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 12 March 1969, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/karp69.htm.
- Cummings, ibid.
- A solitary exception, before Castelli invited Warhol to join his gallery, was a solo show at Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery in November 1962.
- This was not lost on reviewers of Apple's Gallery One show. Norbert Lynton, for example, described the works as ‘frightening’, suggesting that Apple's self-portraits rendered explicit the ‘memento mori impulse that hides behind all art’ (Norbert Lynton, ‘London Letter’, Art International 7, no. 5 (25 May 1963): 60. And a commentator in The Times thought them ‘chilling’, writing, ‘what impresses is their sudden remoteness from us…. Painted to kill, they are so obviously the inhabitants of another dimension’ (‘Things seen: live stills and still lives’, The Times, 7 May 1963).
- See Andy Warhol's answers to questions posed by Gene Swenson in ‘What is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters, Part I’, ARTnews 62, no. 7 (November 1963), reprinted in Pop, 230, 232.
- The finished work produced for the Barrons comprised a grid of four canvases, each showing a single image from the photo-booth sequence, which rearranges the strip of film to create the impression of a set of movements unfolding in continuous time. There are also a number of individual canvases reproducing single images of the artist, some of which were sold, others remaining in the artist's studio after his death. See catalogue entries nos. 486–95 in Warhol 01: Paintings and Sculpture 1961–1963, The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 1, ed. Georg Frei and Neil Printz (London: Phaidon, 2002).
- It is important to note that both artists return at numerous points in their careers to the self portrait as a subject. See, for example, Andy Warhol Self Portraits, ed. Dietmar Elger (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2004). Apple reused Freeman's images on numerous occasions in the period 1963 to 1967, printing canvases in different combinations and colours. He then had himself re-photographed with the same front and back view in 1969 (the photographer was Ira Mazer) and 1974 (the photographer was Hiro), to record the superficial effects of changing fashion and the lasting signs of ageing. See From Barrie Bates to Billy Apple (London: Serpentine Gallery, 1974).
- Wystan Curnow in conversation with the author, November 2008.
- He also worked for Jack Tinker and Partners, a high-end think-tank for product development whose offices overlooked MoMA.
- Nuts and Bolts!, Allan Stone Gallery, 1962. Apple showed bronzes here still using the name Barrie Bates.
- Apple recalls being taken to Warhol's Factory by Birillo prior to the American Supermarket show. In conversation with author, November 2008.
- In addition, Apple produced a number of tin buttons, using images of apples reproduced on a printed sheet he had collected and brought with him from England. Birillo similarly made buttons with images provided by Warhol (a riff on the stars and stripes) and Lichtenstein (a cooked turkey) to give away as part of the mock ‘promotion’ surrounding the event, but Apple never released his, refusing to allow them to be given away. Apple in conversation with the author, November 2008.
- Christoph Grunenberg, ‘The American Supermarket’, in Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture, ed. Christoph Grunenberg and Max Hollein (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2002), 172.
- Perhaps, with the distance of hindsight, it is just this sour note that deepens and renders more complex our appreciation of the American Supermarket.
- See Life Magazine, 20 November 1964.
- It is interesting to note that the only publication surveying pop art that does mention Apple is one of the earliest. This is Lucy Lippard's Pop Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1966). Given its timeliness in terms of the newness of the movement, Lippard enables different voices to consider pop art's characteristics at a stage when the main lineaments of the movement are still in formation, and surveys practice in not only New York and Britain, but also California, Europe, and Canada. Apple's work is briefly mentioned, and his sculpture 2 Minutes 3.3 Seconds is illustrated (67). Lippard's conclusion, however, which claims the definitive attributes of the movement to be distinctively American, begins the process by which the complex manifestations of pop are corralled into art historical categories that are geographically specific.
- This is somewhat similar to the argument Thomas Crow mounts in his essay ‘Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts’ in Thomas Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 3–38.
- Lawrence Alloway, ‘Pop Art: The Words’, in Auction 1, no. 5 (February 1968) cited by Rainer Crone, Andy Warhol (London: Thames & Hudson, 1970), 21.
- Crone, 55.
- Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1996), 12.
- Foster, 32.
- As Donald Preziosi has put it, ‘In point of fact, art history makes colonial subjects of us all.’ See Donald Preziosi, ‘The Art of Art History’, in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 514.
- This ‘third way’ would sit somewhere between the efforts of someone like Kobena Mercer in his series Annotating Art's Histories (MIT Press) and the critical accounts of Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H Buchloh, Hal Foster, and Rosalind Krauss in their massive and contentious volume Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006).
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